Diving into Swan Lake: After 45 years, Alberta Ballet set to tackle a masterpiece (with video, galleries)

Salena Kitteringham, Edmonton Journal03.26.2012

Hayna Gutierrez plays white swan Odette with partner Elier Bourzac during a dress rehearsal for Swan Lake. Gutierrez, a Cuban defector, is a Swan Lake veteran. She will alternate in the role with Mariko Kondo, who is dancing the role for the first time.Colleen De Neve Chris Schwarz
/ Calgary Herald

Alberta Ballet dancers performing during the dress rehearsal for the upcoming production of Swan Lake.Colleen De Neve Chris Schwarz
/ Calgary Herald

Swan Lake is easily the world’s most famous ballet. A stream of beautiful tutus, with Tchaikovsky’s stirring, romantic score, it’s the archetype the mind conjures up when it thinks of ballet.

But do we really know it?

Sure, we’ve seen Russian figure skaters win Olympic gold with their Dying Swan performances (not actually from Swan Lake, but related in spirit). And our hearts soared in the final scene of Billy Elliot as we watched a grown Billy taking the lead in a modern Swan Lake. But putting derivatives like the Black Swan movie aside, most Albertans, even the most devout ballet season ticket-holders, have rarely had the chance to see Swan Lake performed in its original 1895 form. Until now.

Jean Grand-Maitre, Alberta Ballet’s artistic director, says the time is right for the company, at 45 years into its history, to premiere Swan Lake. He believes it now has the calibre of dancers required to do justice to the masterwork and that the pre-professional students at the Alberta Ballet School are strong enough for the large corps de ballet the piece demands.

The National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet each took on Swan Lake much earlier in their histories. But they both rely on their respective schools to fill out Swan Lake, as no ballet company can afford to have 65 to 100 full-time dancers anymore, certainly not in North America outside of New York City.

Swan Lake is like a special 45th anniversary gift to Alberta audiences because there won’t be many companies touring the piece anymore.

The National Ballet, for one, cannot afford it. It has said so publicly. Although its 60th anniversary mixed bill was beautiful, it is going to take years to rebrand Canada’s national ballet company outside of Toronto along those eclectic lines.

And as much as audiences deserve the chance to see Swan Lake, the Alberta Ballet dancers have earned the opportunity to dance it.

It is generally acknowledged that the trio of great traditional repertoire ballets that all classical ballerinas aspire to dance are Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake (the latter two by Tchaikovsky).

“The dancers train their whole lives to do these ballets,” Grand-Maitre says. “It’s like if you were trained to be a classical musician and you were never allowed to play Mozart. The dancers want to dance these ballets.”

Once Grand-Maitre saw how his dancers handled Kirk Peterson’s Sleeping Beauty last season, he knew he had his choreographer and it was time to dive into Swan Lake.

“I’ve seen a lot of Sleeping Beautys all around the world. I often fall asleep,” Grand-Maitre says with a laugh.

“It’s just costume after costume, a lot of regal parading. But the way Kirk sets these classics, there’s drama, there’s emotion, the dancers are free.

“It’s not like a bunch of music box dancers. Kirk can give them a lot of intensity and theatre, and even though we know we are looking at a noble ballet because of the esthetics, we are living it very emotionally. It’s the way we would connect to an old Beethoven symphony.”

Grand-Maitre describes Peterson, who is also Alberta Ballet’s associate artistic director, as “one of the great American male dancers of his generation.” He began his ballet training at age three in his hometown of New Orleans. In contrast to our lack of exposure to Swan Lake, by age 16, Peterson had seen some of the most famous swans, such as the Royal Ballet’s Margot Fonteyn as well as the Bolshoi Ballet’s Maya Plisetskaya.

He enjoyed a distinguished career at American Ballet Theatre during Mikhail Baryshnikov’s reign, so you can imagine what the Swan Lake standard was in those days.

Having seen hundreds of Swan Lakes go through New York City over the years, Peterson says he witnessed the ballet’s evolution, or de-evolution, an oversimplification of Swan Lake from the famous 1895 version by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov.

(There was an earlier version by the Bolshoi Ballet in 1877, but it was not well received.)

“The trend toward modernization moved ballet away from its traditional roots, and in doing so it was sort of like throwing the baby out with the bath water. I think people didn’t realize how much of Swan Lake was dissipating as time went by,” he says.

A self-described ballet history fanatic, Peterson ended up being two degrees of separation from someone involved in the original 1895 productions in St. Petersburg. His dance teacher in New Orleans, Lelia Haller, performed with the great Olga Spessivtseva at the Paris Opera in the 1920s and Spessivtseva was a dancer in the original Petipa and Ivanov Swan Lake production.

“By accident, I happened to know people who maintained this information and over the years I just gathered it,” Peterson says.

His aim in creating Swan Lake for Alberta Ballet has been to restore a damaged icon.

“I think the most important thing for Swan Lake is that it works theatrically, in that the narrative carries through,” Peterson says of his version’s emphasis on narrative flow.

Originally fashioned from German and Russian folklore, Swan Lake is an epic story of love and betrayal, with dramatic characters such as Odette, Queen of the Swans, the treacherous Black Swan, Odile, and the naively amorous Prince Siegfred.

“There is a certain suspension of disbelief, because it is a fairy tale of course, but at the same time, it is a very accessible ballet because of the incredible score that was written for it,” Peterson says.

“Swan Lake has a tight romantic grip on the public and I think a lot of that has to do with the incredibly beautiful score.”

Of course, for a company to successfully pull off Swan Lake, it has to be able to do the steps, which are extremely difficult.

“For contemporary dancers to do it, they have to be well-versed in classical ballet technique and willing to find their endurance in a four-act ballet. They have to have a staying power and endurance and they have to be sensitive artists.”

For a ballerina, dancing the lead in Swan Lake is the greatest role and arguably the most demanding. She has to sustain the emotions of two distinctive characters, the innocent and pure White Swan and the conniving Black Swan. She has to master the technique of super adagio, to balance and extend slowly with the utmost control and beauty. There are whipping fast turns — 32 fouettes, all the jumps and the musicality — every challenge in the technical ballet vocabulary book is thrown at her.

Alberta Ballet’s Mariko Kondo and Hayna Gutierrez will alternate in the roles of Odette /Odile for this production. Kondo is dancing the role for the first time, while Gutierrez, a Cuban defector, is a Swan Lake veteran. She has had to erase how she has danced the role previously because Peterson wants her to approach Swan Lake completely differently than she did back in Havana.

To give you an idea of how seriously Alberta Ballet is taking up the challenge to successfully produce such a masterwork for the first time, it has been rehearsing Swan Lake since July.

“I have never seen Alberta Ballet in better shape than they are right now rehearsing Swan Lake,” says Grand-Maitre. “We really want to come out of the gate with panache.”

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.

Share

Diving into Swan Lake: After 45 years, Alberta Ballet set to tackle a masterpiece (with video, galleries)